


I've Got This

by WritetheWrong



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 511, Episode Tag, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 09:23:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3686937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritetheWrong/pseuds/WritetheWrong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lip's thoughts post 511 on he and Ian and the fight his brother's facing right now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Got This

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely ADORE Lip and Ian's relationship and man i've missed it the past few seasons what's with letting them interact with everyone but each other. Their moments are gold and they always have been. I really hope to see more in the finale. Also Gallavich forever and ever amen.

 

 

_‘Ian Gallagher was released into the care of a Monica Gallagher…’_

It hits you right in the solar plexus. All the air is suddenly gone from your lungs. And only one word fills your brain.

_‘Fuck’._

Fiona stares at you, you can see the same naked horror reflected in her eyes that must be in your own. Monica. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Monica has Ian, Ian and Monica, fuck, fuck, fuck. Talk about the worst possible person to be around your little brother right now, or come to think of it, ever.

Mickey reverses the car and turns you all around and his eyes meet yours in the car mirror. ‘Ok, so how bad is this, like on a scale of 1 to fucking horrifying?’

‘Take fucking horrifying, times it by a thousand and you’d be close’ Debbie responds despondently.

You hold Liam closer and itch to hit something.

‘How the fuck…’ Fiona starts, ‘How the fuck does she even know he’s here?’

You close your eyes a beat, wait for her to get it, ‘isn’t it obvious Fiona?’

You can see the incredulous moment she gets it, her eyes widening as she spins in her seat and stares at you ‘he told her?’

_Ding, ding, ding._

‘Fuck!’ Your sister runs a hand through her hair and tells Mickey to pull over.

Oh god. Oh shit. How long has Ian been speaking to her? How long has she been getting inside his sick, vulnerable mind? Jesus. How did you miss this? How the fuck did you all miss it?

You’ve been so busy trying to outthink Ian’s military predicament, trying to think of the best way to prove his mental instability to the army, so he avoids jail. You’ve been reading every possible law clause and army regulation you can find. You’ve been trying to fuck all your worries away with Helene. Jesus. You’ve been so busy trying to fight the external issues surrounding your brother that you’ve taken your eyes off the ball. Off of Ian himself. And now look who the fuck moves in. Like a shark towards a minnow. And you just practically fed him right to her.

Oh fuck.

_‘He’ll go from depressed, to incredibly wound up…’_

_‘He’s crazy…’_

_‘She made our lives hell..’_

_‘Can he take care of himself?’, ‘Sometimes, no.’_

Oh. _Oh_ _Ian_.

You hadn’t been able to look at him, you’d kept your eyes fixed on the desk in front of you, on Liam, on your hands, on the fucking GI Janes in front of you, anywhere but on the devastated defeat on your little brother’s face.

You all took turns to stab him in the heart and you couldn’t even look him in the eye while you did it. You’re a coward, you’re a fucking coward.

Ever since Ian started to show symptoms, you had been a coward. You hadn’t wanted to face it, hadn’t wanted to address the blatant realisation that probably your favourite person on this shithole of a planet was rapidly and quietly losing his mind. He was doing it in the most Ian way too. Independently, so fiercely privately, so strongly, so quietly alone. It breaks your heart. He breaks your heart.

He never did like to be centre of attention. Hated it in fact. Ian was the internaliser, the steady, controlled, strong, quiet one. The one who bottled it all up and supported everyone and then went off like a silent nuclear bomb that nobody noticed until you got caught in the aftershock of it all.

You noticed though. More often than not you noticed. You and Ian had always come as a pair, always had each other’s backs. Partners in crime, Irish twins, conspirators in life. Backseat car whisperers, bedroom fort builders, brothers. You couldn’t remember a time before Ian and you never wanted to know a time after.

You’d known deep down that he was off, that something wasn’t right, immediately. You just did not want to face it. You didn’t want to lose your right arm, your stable, comfortable, strong right arm. He’d wallowed a little too long in bed after Mickey’s wedding for you to just shrug it off as teenage angst. You’d got this prickly little feeling of ‘not right, not right, not right’. You’d tried to get him up, you’d nagged and thrown things and gave him a load of shit. It hadn’t worked. He had been down. Not Monica levels of down, but down enough for you to worry.

You’d watched him closely. But then the shit with Mandy almost murdering Karen had reared its head and you’d took your eye a little off Ian. You’d took your eye off him.

Then he’d been up. Up and GI Jane armied up to the hilt, all cool and focussed and Ian again, and he’d breezed out of the kitchen all ‘later’. And you had felt that niggle return. Something wasn’t right. You’d followed him, talked to him, told him you’d been worried you’d have to hide the bed sheets. You’d been a little too close to the truth. He’d reassured you. Acted fine. Breezy, focussed, calm, stoic Ian and you’d taken it. For fucks sake you’d taken it, because it was easier than believing an alternative. That he wasn’t ok. That he was far from ok. That he was going under.

He’d joined the fucking army. Your baby brother. Under your I.D, that’s how not ok he was. And you had only yourself to blame for that.

‘Where the fuck do we go?’ Mickey blurts out and you are broken out of your torturous memories. ‘Where would she take him?’

‘Anywhere’ you tell him ‘they could be anywhere.’

‘Fucking awesome’, he responds. And he looks so dejected, so lost that for a moment you see everything your brother sees in him and more. It’s easy to forget Mickey’s almost the same age as you. That he’s just a kid really. An angry, thug kid sure but he has his own story, and it’s a story that you know you’ve probably judged too harshly.

All you’d seen for a long time though had been your brother’s bruises, the abject misery in his eyes, the broken hearted way he’d closed in on himself. And Ian was hardly an open person to begin with. He knew what he wanted though, and that person had been Mickey for a long, long time.

And watching Ian die a little inside every time Mickey refused to acknowledge them, or him, or whatever the hell they were, that made you angry. That made you protective and violent and angry.

Ian had incited that in you since forever, that need to protect. That need to step in front of him, to take the blame, to take a beating, to take care of him, all of it. He was tough, he was one of the toughest people you knew but he felt things too deeply, he didn’t shield himself against the world like you and Fiona did. He didn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve he practically held it out in front of him, a beacon to the scum of the earth to smash it to smithereens. That is something that terrifies you.

His big heart. His kind nature. He felt too much, he was stretched to thin, at some point he was probably always going to snap from it all.

‘We could try and track his phone, use GPS’ you offer, interrupting Fiona and Mickey’s arguing ‘try and find them that way?’

‘Ok’, Fiona replies, running a hand through her hair, ‘ok, that’s a start’. Mickey starts up the engine again and you watch your sister biting at her nail. Tell tale Fiona stress move. Debs has Liam on her knee and she has her head back on the seat, staring at nothing. You all know what Monica means to your family, what her re-appearance means. The shockwaves she emits never quite go away. They pulse on and on forever in each of her children as dark and as deep as a wound.

You rub your hands together, you rub them together. You are itching with the need to rip her away from him and you can’t, you can’t. She will pull him down, she will pull him down into the chasm of mayhem and the quagmire of insanity and she’ll break him into a thousand pieces. Ian. Ian. Ian.

You don’t want him in a thousand pieces. You want him whole and present and somewhere you can all help him get better. With you. In your eyeline, in your world, somewhere you can stand in front of him again, where you can protect him again.

Monica is toxic. Broken and toxic and the last possible thing you want around your brother. Your sad, struggling, big hearted little brother. If he was dangling by his fingertips on the edge of the precipice before then surely she's dragged him over it by now. She does that. She always does that.

Monica and Ian, Ian and Monica, they’ve always shared more than the rest of you. You used to think it was looks, but then with the revelation that Frank wasn’t Ian’s father, you realised it was more than that. It was heart. It was vulnerability, it was feeling too much. And now it’s god damned bi-polar. How you despise this disorder.

Tommy Harrow at school had called you bi-polar once when you’d yelled at him after gym. Just a stupid kid, no idea what it meant, just throwing it at you for your sullen response. You’d broke his nose.

The emotion that word could conjure up inside you scares you half to death.

And now Ian and Monica have a whole new commonality. Genetic russian roulette Fiona had called it. She’s so right.

Ian isn’t Monica though. As much as you may have been trying to paint him as such to the army. He isn’t selfish. That’s not Ian. That’s the opposite of Ian.

You need to make him believe it. You need to wear him down till he opens up to you, till he talks. He used to talk to you. He used to share things.

It had shocked you how easily he’d admitted to you at the courthouse ‘something’s wrong with me’. It’s the most honest you’ve seen him about all the shit going on with him. That acknowledgment felt huge. Felt raw. And a horrifying part of you felt grateful, grateful it was you he’d admit that with. You and nobody else. You still have a way of making him talk, he still knows your relationship is one of trust. Deep down he knows that.

But he’s sick. He needs help. He needs you more than he’s ever needed you before.

The road signs blur by as Mickey guns the motor back home. You’ll come up with a plan, you’ll get him back, you’ll stand in front of him again and this time you’ll fight this with him.

You can’t stop picturing the way he looked at you in the van, all those months, years even ago. The look on his face like you hung the moon. Your little brother. Your Ian.

‘Name a single time i’ve let you down?’

When did that change? When did it go from never to sometimes, to always. To constantly letting him down? You’ve let him down lately. In so many ways. In absence, in cowardice, in action. You can’t let him down again, you won’t.

‘Ian you’ve got this’.

You’re wrong. He hasn’t got this. He does not have this. You need to have it now. You wonder why that was all you could think of to say. ‘You’ve got this’. You can’t unsee his face outside the courts, the despair and the actual look of drowning in his eyes. You’d wanted to make him believe in himself again.

Ian had always had a quiet confidence in his own skin, in who he was, he’d owned who he was in ways that commanded such respect and deep admiration from you. You'd been running from who you were and unable to figure that out for as long as you can remember. He hadn’t though. Seeing him at the courthouse though, seeing how little he felt in control, seeing the utter war behind his eyes. You wanted to make him believe he could fight it, he could deal, he could be strong enough. You needed to make him believe in himself.

At the army base though you’d all ripped that away from him. You’d offered the opposite of faith, you’d offered total doubt in him. For his own benefit, for his own freedom but you had performed the worlds cruellest take back.

Now though, now you need to make him believe in you, need to make him believe in himself again, need to make him better. He’s never going to be better though. Never wholly.

You meant what you told the financial aid ‘there’s no help for it’. There’s no magic pill that’ll ever make Ian the happy, secure, confident in his skin kid he’d been, but there’s ways you can support him. Ways to help him find a new Ian, an Ian that’s still him, but a supported, loved, new pathed version. You need to step up and be there. You need to cut the crap and stop leaving your brother to flounder. You need to fight for him, with him and alongside him now.

You take out your phone and make a promise to your brother. ‘Come home Ian.’ you type, I’ve got this. I’ve got it now.’

You mean it.


End file.
